This is true for ALL products. Once new versions come out the older versions go in decline. Or do you honestly still watch movies through VHS? It's really simple basic economics, I'm sure Blizzard is fully aware of this effect and have made changes to the game accordingly.

What is there to improve? When the first cars were invented people were still trying to breed faster horses. It's just a stupid battle that you can't win. That's pretty much what you're suggesting as well. In the end a horse can't compete with a car. WoW can't compete with newer games. There is no simple change to WoW that will bring people back in masses. WoW is old and outdated, it has been in decline for a few years now and that will only continue.

The only thing that could get people to return would be releasing WoW 2 with an updated engine, updated graphics, updated game mechanics, new story, etc. But that would be an entirely different game.

This is simply not true. Your comparison to any other product is inaccurate. I'm not sure what product you are comparing WoW with, but the more accurate comparison would be to compare it with Disneyland. Disneyland was opened in 1955. Since then many new theme parks have cropped up, but Disneyland is still there. This is because Disneyland 2013 is not the same as Disneyland 1955. They have continuously upgraded, altered and renovated the theme park to keep it fresh, making people return and new people to come. This is exactly how WoW has worked these past 9 years. The fact that WoW is old is irrelevant, as they continue to make upgraded not only to game play, but to graphics as well. There is no reason to believe WoW does not have a bright future ahead still.

This is simply not true. Your comparison to any other product is inaccurate. I'm not sure what product you are comparing WoW with, but the more accurate comparison would be to compare it with Disneyland. Disneyland was opened in 1955. Since then many new theme parks have cropped up, but Disneyland is still there. This is because Disneyland 2013 is not the same as Disneyland 1955. They have continuously upgraded, altered and renovated the theme park to keep it fresh, making people return and new people to come. This is exactly how WoW has worked these past 9 years. The fact that WoW is old is irrelevant, as they continue to make upgraded not only to game play, but to graphics as well. There is no reason to believe WoW does not have a bright future ahead still.

I guess it depends on how you define "product". World of Warcraft and Disneyland are not products, they are brands. World of Warcraft content releases are products, which the graph does apply to. Disneyland rides/attractions are products, which the graph does apply to. That illustration shows examples of brands surviving by consistently producing new successful products over time.

Community is by choice, it is not something that can be forced upon players.
If the community in a game goes down the drain, then that is down to player choice only, no other reason.
Convenience is linked to community, but in the opposite way to what some people claim.
A horrible anti-social community increases the need for convenience, the need for queuing and random groups because of inaccessibility of traditional organised content.
Fixed schedules, excessive gear requirements, favouring of friends/guildies etc.
What do those do to the community ? Make it more closed and more segregated than ever.

THAT is why the conveniences exist as they do, because players increasingly forced them.

Ah I was waiting for your biased hatred towards raiders post. For someone who talks about choice and convenience you shot yourself in the foot with your anti-Flex and anti-proving grounds talk.

Form your own group if you dont like how others lead. No one is keeping you from entering the instance. Players choosing to work together as a team and place the benefit of the group over an individual are not anti-social. The random finder systems get used used by players with social issues or anti-teamwork mentality and force themselves upon others in group based content. Groups did not get anymore restrictive than it did back in Classic. WotLK and Cata group restrictions was nothing new.

Yes it is your choice how you choose to talk with others, just be ready to be responsible for the outcomes of your choices.

Originally Posted by Vaelorian

LFR is always an option.

Given the current run times even LFR would not be an option for those who found one hour heroic dungeons to be too long. LFR has gotten in an odd position. The group size was also supposed to help resolve queue time issues for DPS and instead you see queue times twice that of Cata heroics. To run all wings could bring someone to around the time it took someone to run seven heroics in Cata which would give far more VP.

The tools don't take away from the community, the community has taken away from itself.

What did you see happen before? People spending hours to form groups for simple shit ... which means they weren't doing guild runs ... so the 'guild' thing was a problem already.

Playing with friends x-realm is a great thing, because playing with friends is great, especially not having to spend extra money to do so. Making friends on servers ... well, not everyone thinks every person that says hi to them is their 'friend'. You also wouldn't really befriend a person who is a trade chat douchebag either.

LFD/LFR ... well, it sure beats forming a group for 2 hours, flying out there, to have one of the people leave before entering the damn place for whatever reason ... not to mention the gearscore crap that started to spring up.

See, the tools don't take away from a toxic community, they just give you alternative ways to play without directly dealing with them. See, you can still form groups, you can still join/create a guild, you can still do everything you've always done, and now you can also use the tools in game with those friends and guilds to make it more convenient for you. No need for using kick, if you do full friend/guild runs!

Yes, server communities in theory are great ... but not when the community was already becoming very toxic.

You want to remove core features of WoW ... features that if they don't launch in other MMOs it is considered a travesty!

Just remember, if any new MMO launches, be sure to run to the defense of any 'missing' features you wish to be removed from WoW, and state how that company's decision to not implement it is far superior to WoW's decision to keep the feature.

See, what Blizz is doing is working on the entire game being -one- community. That is a move towards a true 'MMO', right now we have that first 'M' standing for moderately (multiplayer), not massively. 5-20k per server. Boasts millions of subs, but you might only see a couple hundred unique players at any given time outside super crowded highly factional servers like Illidan and Stormrage (about 20k and almost all in one faction). As they work on connected realms, as we go forward, there may be a time where ALL servers are connected, or there will only be a few 'super-servers' where the community is split between, relying on tech like they do in CRZ, spawning another instance when one gets full. Other games go about this similar but different (Tera and SWtOR, channels/instanced planets-fleets).

Look, you can try to blame the features/tools all you want ... the real problem lies with the people playing the game, not the things we can use in the game. Fix the people, starting with yourself. It doesn't take many to influence a great group. Be consistent. Be helpful. Spread the positive attitude and it will catch on. It has worked in other games, but it takes someone making the leap and organizing positive server events. Giving away runs instead of selling them. Organizing community events and activities. Taking the time to help out lowbies as a form of recruitment, not just random whisper spam. Helping them out even if they are guilded, and hint they'd be welcome with your guild if they ever needed a new home. Just doing things step by step, YOU can create the interactive community you desire ... just don't expect it to be handed to you without effort, Blizz can only design the games and systems, they can't MAKE you be social or interact. That is up to YOU.

Huh? The only thing removed was Have Group Will Travel. What other convenience was removed? And what is worse... tell me about what kind of convenience was added in Cata. Cause that expansion was THE expansion with the most convenience ever until MoP.

What other convenience was removed? Hmmm, how about reasonably easy 5-mans and ICC10 level raiding? Also, HG:WT was removed in MOP iirc.

"In contrast to numerous studies of community structure, we find that the best communities are relatively small with sizes only up to about 100 nodes. We also find that above a size of about 100, the "quality" of communities gets worse and worse and communities more and more "blend into" the graph. Eventually, even the existence of communities (at least when viewed as sets with stronger internal than external connectivity) is rather questionable. This seems to agree with Dunbar who predicted that 150 is the upper limit on the size of the human community." -http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/ncp-www08.pdf

These conveniences cause us to interact with so many people that we don't form a community. There are very little consequences for being rude, incompetent, or afk, when we feel that we'll never see anyone a second time.

This is pretty spot on. Not only do these conveniences increase population size beyond what is really sustainable, they also drop the new player into a community from the get go without giving them a reason to join it. Also, guilds themselves now reward players for joining a group while still leveling and punish them for leaving the guild by resetting their guild progress; this discourages them finding guilds that suit them. Those guilds are rewarded for exceeding the ideal population size as well.

Then of course, there's the situation where the only time it's beneficial to be in a group is when it's required, decreasing the opportunities to find other people of similar interests and skill level on an individual basis. That of course has been compounded by the cross realm community challenges, though this may be fixed with their "not server mergers" system.

There is no simple change to WoW that will bring people back in masses. WoW is old and outdated, it has been in decline for a few years now and that will only continue.

The only thing that could get people to return would be releasing WoW 2 with an updated engine, updated graphics, updated game mechanics, new story, etc. But that would be an entirely different game.

Arguably each expansion includes updated graphics, mechanics, new story, etc. And despite claims of it being 'outdated', can you name an MMO that is, on all fronts, a superior experience (and have it be a concensus opinion)? I have a complaint list a mile long with this game, and I can't name a better title at this point.

It's like folks who rail on about the desktop PC being outdated, while ignoring the fact that there is absolutely nothing on the market more customizable, more suitable for computing tasks excluding mobility, and certainly nothing more powerful. It's not even debatable.

It's just that the pc itself has existed for decades, and our society tends to gravitate towards the myth that newer is always better. I'll wait patiently while the wheel is reinvented.

Beautiful veins and bloodshot eyes.
"If you are not capable of cruelty, you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is" - J. Peterson

And despite claims of it being 'outdated', can you name an MMO that is, on all fronts, a superior experience (and have it be a concensus opinion)?

This bits a little weird, I don't think any mmo is going to be considered superior to all others as a consensus opinion. MMOs have expanded enough now that people don't all expect the same thing from them.

Personally, I think there's a good long list of now standard features that WoW is slowly adopting (some that it can't really due to current player expectations), and this does make it feel old.

This bits a little weird, I don't think any mmo is going to be considered superior to all others as a consensus opinion. MMOs have expanded enough now that people don't all expect the same thing from them.

Personally, I think there's a good long list of now standard features that WoW is slowly adopting (some that it can't really due to current player expectations), and this does make it feel old.

I should have worded it differently. I guess I should say that if you look at all the key points that an mmo provides to a player, this game still scores fairly consistently... some other games, for example, have better graphics, but might be quite lacking in some other department. A lot of that is simply related to the maturity and support of the product (add-on's, for example), but the point still stands.

Beautiful veins and bloodshot eyes.
"If you are not capable of cruelty, you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is" - J. Peterson

What other convenience was removed? Hmmm, how about reasonably easy 5-mans and ICC10 level raiding? Also, HG:WT was removed in MOP iirc.

Guess people thought convenience = easymode

The dungeons being hard or not has nothing to do with convenience. Is it convenient the dungeons are cakewalks? For me it is not convenient at all, cause I like dungeons where I need to focus instead of falling asleep. I like to earn my way to a reward. I like the sense of adventure not knowing if the group will succeed in clearing the dungeon. (be it through difficulty or because the group falls apart)

You name the 10 man ICC raids. This was not a feature. This was an imbalance. They should have balanced 10 and 25 man equally. So this was not a convenience feature.

People like to tout WoW being so popular when it first was released because it was so much "harder" (Which many would argue is just a code word for needlessly tedious and/or just complete broken and crap, ala Ret and many other absolutely crap specs from Vanilla)

But they seem to always overlook the fact that when WoW was released, even with Vanilla being considered "harder" than it is currently, it was still considered the "casual" alternative to EQ, Ultima, and other similar MMO's that had been around for a while already.

People like to tout WoW being so popular when it first was released because it was so much "harder" (Which many would argue is just a code word for needlessly tedious and/or just complete broken and crap, ala Ret and many other absolutely crap specs from Vanilla)

But they seem to always overlook the fact that when WoW was released, even with Vanilla being considered "harder" than it is currently, it was still considered the "casual" alternative to EQ, Ultima, and other similar MMO's that had been around for a while already.

You are correct, but I dont understand why it matters? The argument people use is that it is too casual now, not that it was the most casual MMO when it was released.

The community on my old server sucked in TBC. It was cliqueish and exclusionary, to the point that anyone not in t5, who wasn't a rogue or a mage, would be lambasted for wanting to DPS 5-man Heroics as early as a month into Patch 2.3. It was literally more convenient and more feasible for a fresh 70 to lose their way to Season 1 (later 2) in BGs despite the high Honor cost than it was to try pugging through 5-mans. Even the t4 feeder guilds started getting picky about who they would take because they were sick of the t5 guilds poaching them, and the t5 guilds got picky because they were sick of the t6 guilds poaching them. The t6 guilds were picky because they earned it.

Servers like mine were why LFD was implemented. They were why guild levels were implemented to encourage sticking with your guild. They were why Wrath did an about-face and offered more accessible, easier 5-mans.

Big guilds support big communities. Communities support individuals. The end of Wrath, beginning of Cataclysm saw a lot of big guilds collapse because of splits in raiding groups. We know it happened, we saw it on every server out there. You may like your close knit 10 man guilds, but time and again, they split up, half of the players quit the game because they're left isolated without community.

That's why we're returning to larger raiding models which require large guilds to support them. Sub loss is nothing to do with convenience of things like LFR/LFD/Flying mounts. All those offer accessibility, but the biggest enabler of access is, was, and always will be other players. It's amazing how few people recognise that, while at the same time relying on it. Blizzard need to support it, but not by removing the other tools, because we all use them anyway.

The dungeons being hard or not has nothing to do with convenience. Is it convenient the dungeons are cakewalks? For me it is not convenient at all, cause I like dungeons where I need to focus instead of falling asleep. I like to earn my way to a reward. I like the sense of adventure not knowing if the group will succeed in clearing the dungeon.

Yeah, only problem is, most people do not agree with your opinion. Consequently, in order to keep/expand their playerbase, major VG editors have to either follow that trend (WoW) or be happy with a small niche playerbase (EvE)

Originally Posted by Vaelorian

You name the 10 man ICC raids. This was not a feature. This was an imbalance. They should have balanced 10 and 25 man equally.

Balance raids equally despite ICC 10-man dropping worse loot? Now that is an original - albeit very bad - idea.

We don't really have to talk to anyone else, and we'll often never see anyone we play with ever again (in LFR, LFD, and X-Server regions)). There's a social consequence to your interactions in a finite (especially small) community. If you're completely anonymous, there really aren't any repercussions; not much incentive to be kind, try to play well, or even play at all.

This is all player choice though. There's no special benefit socially to being forced to interact with people that you would never give the time of day to in real life.

I don't need an incentive to be nice or to play well. I have enough self-respect that I don't hide like some coward behind internet anonymity just so I can act out my fantasy of being a moronic asshole. And when I log on to play, I log on to play, not watch TV on some other monitor. I value relationships over convenience. So personally I don't buy the argument that convenience leads to a less social community. I believe there's a serious fallacy in the premise.

The fallacy is in believing that realms are the primary social unit. They're not: guilds are. If realms ever really were the level at which a real community was created they weren't for long. That began to inevitably break down when the game started to grow by leaps and bounds. Guilds however: you aren't anonymous in a guild if it's a good one; you won't be in a guild very long if you're an asshole or fuck off in dungeons/raids. There are relationships formed in guilds. Friends can be made.

Once the game really started to expand, the notion that realms were small tight communities became little more than nostalgia. That was years ago and before the random matchmaking tools appeared. LFG only accelerated a process that was already well under way as the game expanded into the multi-millions. 'Community' breakdown at the realm level would have happened anyway. Realm reputation as a concept is wildly overblown. It was rare on any sizable realm if you knew more than a couple of dozen people. Most of the standout personalities on realms were people you knew you wanted to avoid.

If, after all of this, you want community on a realm level, find an RP realm that sponsors realm-wide events. RP realms can get to be too large as well but for the most part--aside from PVP realms which I don't play on--they're the only realms in which things happen that occasionally bring people together. RP realms generally do have a better community while at the same time, they have all of the conveniences of PVE realms. So it's not that. PVE realms generally don't much go in for that sort of thing where everyone on the realm is invited to some event. There's nothing stopping that though. It just happens more often on good RP realms.

Just to add on a bit more: With Blizzard rolling out their connected realm technology the problem of realms being the primary unit of social responsibility gets only worse. The only advantage to it and it's an advantage that supercedes the problem is that it should be much easier to create the sorts of guilds that people are interested in, be it social, raiding, RP or otherwise. Which again only points out that the primary social unit in the game is a guild, not a realm. Nothing to do with convenience but everything to do with the frame in which 'community' is created. It's on you to surround yourself with players you find acceptable as friends, associates, etc. Don't expect Blizzard to force people into communities they would never join. Like your behavior in the game and with others, it's a personal responsibility. If one doesn't want to subscribe to that, that's fine. But they shouldn't complain about the outcomes.

The game hasn't reached its stable point yet nor will it, it will continue to have spikes and declines but the rate at which its losing subscribers still has the game relevant for several years unless something drastic happens.